After a very sad performance of Slovenian quasi Pirate Party last week, where we could see that they have no idea how copyright works, we now have even more evidence that Slovenia is a land of pirates that have no respect for other people’s intellectual work.
@skatey and @Zealoth point out to a blunt copyright infringement on two very important web pages in our online space.
First is University of Ljubljana, that should act as a basic building block of our society. Evidently, they have no problems with stealing a stock-photo that costs less than a cup of coffee, that has still a watermark on it! That’s the same institution that will gladly expel a student for copying a paragraph of text without proper citation.
Second example is a Startup competition at startup.si (they don’t deserve a link), that once again had no problem with taking stock photo with a watermark:
These two sites, and the institutions that they represent, send a clear message to our students and entrepreneurs:
We don’t respect intellectual property and you don’t need to either. Take note of that in your future professional work and when you form your own business.
Arrrrrrr!
I agree with you that intellectual property is not respected enough…sad but true. But question for you: if you know what should be done, why don’t you join pirate party and help them on the right path? Why nobody with the knowledge and passion to make a change don’t want to do anything? It easier to bitch about it, right?
Pirate Party of Slovenia is a bad joke. They want to legalize P2P piracy, while at the same time, don’t care about real issues around copyright reform that is happening at the moment.
As far as active work goes, I’m already fully involved with different organizations like Slo-Tech, Kiberpipa, etc. that already real work in terms of education and lobbying. Not everything happens out in the public.
Yes but you are bitching about the things that are happening in the public…Not everything happens out in the public, lol..so why are you bitching then?And I realy appreciate the work Kiberpipa and Slo-tech guys are doing btw..don’t get me wrong
They are good people who may not have all the answers but at least they are trying…instead of helping them, joining them, everyone is their worst critic…and everyone is like you..so who is pirate party at the moment? nobody, because nobody wants to do it….
and yes it was a very sad performance, I agree..but they are obviously not ready for that kind of confrontation at least not without people who are use to performing and speaking to crowds….or with people with some experience in this field…sometimes you just try to do something you believe in and hope that people will follow and contribute with their own ideas and knowledge…but i guess sometimes or most of the times that just doesn’t happen….
I do not believe in things that Slovenian Pirate Party is (currently) fighting for: taking away the rights of the authors.
We are all very happy to talk to them, each week we organize a number of events to which they can come and get themselves educated on the issues. They’re welcome to come and talk to us, about our problems and issues we’re fighting for.
They’re not present in our community and they don’t seem to be willing to take part in the established infrastructure of support and knowledge that has been already built.
For building IT awareness in 3rd world countries, piracy is actually good.
For building IT awareness in 2nd world countries (Slovenia), piracy should not be persecuted for private parties involved in piracy.
As for the 1st world countries…the market and law should take care of everything…it would probably even grow a big market of obfuscating ip lookup of all parties involved in piracy, within the legal system itself… but at least everybody would pay 🙂
Statements like these are dangerous because they also undermine the basis of open source and other open licenses. That’s my main problem with endorsing “legalized P2P sharing”.
@Mama manka: “2nd/3rd world countries” … it’s just wrong to use expressions like that!
fun article, though.
I second Jure’s opinion – the Pirate Party in Slovenia is just a bandwagon that hopes to gain support by morally justifying what most people in Slovenia do illegally anyway.
If nobody pays for content people consume, there will be no money or incentive for people to produce with. But nobody wants to pay for it.
Now, advertising (eg. content for “free”) could solve some of the problems (like streaming shows off the Internet with embedded ads), but then the very same people who (I shan’t say _steal_) get if for free bitch about the ads.
As a content author myself, my work is dependent on funding. The only difference is, my performances are live (improv theatre) and I am able to pay my rent (well, the performance hall, anyways). Not so for someone producing content in a reproducible medium, like music, video and written works.
What the Pirate Party here isn’t trying to solve is how to optimize this divide, instead to just try and put up a wall to even further moralize piracy.
And while I don’t support big media throwing the gauntlet at end users, I see no reason how piracy is a good thing. It’s a consequence of the economic divide between what people perceive is the fair price and what publishers set to maximize their profits, only to boo-hoo their way to authorities when they see their content ripped online. It’s a matter of closing this gap – I’ve seen this happening in Slovenia with the Windows operating system. With the recent price drops and Microsoft making positive gestures and bringing incentives to end users, I’ve seen people buy more software while noticing the prices go down in sync (like the Win741 program for students).
If you don’t think it’s worth the buck, don’t buy it. There are plenty of other things in life to enjoy.
It was a minor shock to find those Uni LJ pictures from iStockPhoto… but then again, it is in line with everything else at Ljubljana University.
There are stock pictures like that one scattered all over their website.
all I can say is LOL.
So collect a list of the infringing pages and contact legal@istockphoto or something, to try to get this into the light of day?
we did. They said that they can help only if you’re the author of photo. They don’t deal with take-downs themselves.